Considering the Xbox 360 Reset Glitch Hack

Soft-modding your 360

Many people aren’t comfortable with cracking open their console and voiding their warranty. With the original Xbox, softmodding was the big deal. You could enable backups to be played from burned discs, or even off the hard drive. You could watch DVDs as well as movies off of a USB thumb drive or movies that were FTPed over to the HDD, which was upgradeable after softmodding to enormous sizes. It was taking the easy road to customizing your Xbox experience and making it possible to do more with your console than what was intended, but less than what was provided.

The Playstation 2, on the other hand, was a little trickier. It required opening the console, soldering a modchip onto the motherboard, and then you could play games from burned discs or the hard drive. Even the easier Switch Disc method required the case to be opened. As well as extra crap to be purchased, even cases that allowed the top to open just so you could switch discs and play backups. Honestly, I these methods seemed so stupid that I didn’t even bother. My PS2 remains unaltered, sitting in my living room right above my modded Xbox, and below my flashed Xbox 360.

It would have been easier, I suppose, to just pay someone to do it. I am far from a soldering master. I can barely meld wires together. My first attempt at soldering a 360’s DVD drive to make it play backups failed so miserably that the drive was irreparable. The 360 still works however, and I decided this would be a prime candidate for something I have always been interested in. JTAG-ing. It’s not for the faint of heart. It requires taking your Xbox 360 completely apart, soldering a wire here, a wire there, and installing a menu that allows your Xbox 360 to play backups from the hard drive.